Clinical Informatics Research Programme (CIRP)

As a biomedical engineer and PhD student in digital health, Mairi noticed that there is lots of research on virtual reality (VR) in healthcare, but very little VR is used in the NHS. By conducting, analysing and reporting on interviews with healthcare professionals and co-design workshops with young people being treated for cancer, she hopes to bridge this gap by improving our understanding of how VR could be implemented in the NHS.

“Engineers regularly work with new technologies to solve niche problems, but they often have very little context for how the technology will be used in practice.... With services already up and running it can be difficult to fit in new technologies and ways of working, so it's important that my research will understand these obstacles so we can innovate around them.”

Mairi Therese Deighan is conducting her PhD at the University of Bristol.

Medicines go through rigorous testing to find out how they can be used most safely and effectively. This involves pharmacokinetics, the study of how a drug effects the body, such as how long it stays in the blood stream. The huge amount of information gathered in testing of medications could be used in a better way. Right now, it’s locked up in documents. Victoria’s research is looking at how we can automate the extraction of information so it could be presented more quickly and in a useful way. This could help doctors to treat patients, but also be used for vital research into better treatments.

“Right now it takes decades to research new drug treatments, but if we can use previous information about similar medications, we could make these discoveries much, much faster.”

Victoria Smith is conducting her PhD at the UKRI AI Enabled Healthcare Systems CDT at University College London.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems give us comprehensive digital patient data, which could allow hospital staff and researchers to identify children and young people for whom known treatments exist that may be better suited to them. However, we don't know how data in EHRs are connected, and how we can use them to help solve research and clinical questions.

John will use anonymised data from patients treated for kidney problems at GOSH to creates graphs out of connected data points. This means graph analytics could then be used with EHR data to solve research and clinical questions.

"Visualising the connections between data to help us find new things is not a completely new idea, but it's never been done with routinely collected data in healthcare.

This research could uncover how we can use data for this important dimension in healthcare."

​John Booth is conducting his PhD at the UCL GOS Institute of Child Health.

Medical images, such as MRI or CT images, are stacks of 2D images used for analysis and diagnostics. These images are difficult to interpret for non-trained eyes, which could lead to a diminished understanding by patients of their condition and treatment options.

The Holorepository provides an interactive and engaging way to view medical images in 3D. It implements a pipeline to create holographic images from MRI and CT scans. These holograms can then be viewed using devices, such as Microsoft HoloLens, during patient-doctor consultations.

UCL Computer Science MSc Project 2019

Parents of children with nephrotic syndrome,or the children themselves use a paper notebook to record daily the level of protein in their urine. These notes are meant to guide patients/parents on medication dosage and inform the clinical team of the patient’s progress, but they are difficult to interpret and often get lost, or damaged.

The My Nephrotic Notebook mobile app allows users to easily record proteinuria dipstick readings, and based on these results, it informs users whether they have relapsed, are in maintenance, or have reached a period of remission. The data is stored locally and it can be shared with clinical teams via e-mail.

UCL Computer Science MSc Project 2019